Friday, 16 March 2018

We need a human revolution not another industrial one

I also love The five pillars from Jeremy's 2011 book Third Industrial Revolution. These are:

"1) shifting to renewable energy; 2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on site; 3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; 4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbours: and 5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.”

— Excerpted from The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, by Jeremy Rifkin

While there's evidence of progress with the above they're a long way from reality.

We need a human revolution not another industrial one

The World Economic Forum were on about a fourth industrial revolution in 2016 which I thought was nonsense and said so in several posts. Rifkin and others pushed back on the idea believing we’re still to complete the third.

Despite my respect for Rifkin I hate the idea of further industrial revolutions.

I believe they are in the main a form of control by greedy old men and a whole bunch of technological people who are just as greedy (there are some exceptions)

I believe that unless we have a human revolution, digital, data etc will only bring grief (think Facebook/Russia influencing the last American election).

There's already trouble with many. Uber for example where clearly some people are earning under award wages

In all previous industrial revolutions despite the wonderful progress they brought people suffered and the scale this time is unimaginable.